We may not know for a few years, but, according to the
researchers of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional
Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), your boss may not pass
the test.David
Caruso, special assistant to the Dean at Yale College and
co-creator of the online assessment test, tells us that managers
and leaders who take the test typically don't score very well and
are actually surprised that they don't have it all.

Yale School of Management is part of a trend
catching on in business schools — Notre Dame and
Dartmouth are also administering their own tests — to test
prospective students for emotional intelligence, but Yale's
141-item test was created by its own researchers. The MSCEIT
is offered on a voluntary basis and won't be a factor
in the school's highly selective application process right now,
but it's uncertain what the school will do with the results in
the future.

Before Yale can determine whether the test can help them
enhance the admissions process, the results first have to prove
that it can predict certain outcomes. For now, Yale's School of
Management and School of Medicine are allowing applicants the
option to take the test, then they will study the results in a
few years to determine whether using the applicant's emotional
intelligence quotient would have "led to different results,
predicted problems, or predicted unusual achievement."

The idea is that successful leaders and managers should be
able to understand how others around them are feeling and make
changes to their leadership style to efficiently achieve the end
goal. This requires an ability to read people, accurately
understand and manage emotions, communicate effectively, and
adapt quickly to other cultures. And inevitably, schools are ranked based on how well
their students perform after graduation, therefore, a deeper
understanding on whether certain emotional traits have an effect
on future success may play a bigger role in the application
process in the near future.

There are three ways to measure emotional intelligence:
Self-Report, which is where you ask a person questions about how
they view themselves; Other-report (360), which is where you
ask observers to evaluate what they think of a target person,
such as their boss; and ability, which is where you ask a person
to solve emotional problems to test their actual level of skill.

The MSCEIT is an ability test. Below are
some sample questions:

Example 1: What emotions are expressed in this
face? (This counts as two items because even
though there is one face, two different questions are asked about
it).

Yale
University

Example 2:Yale
University

So what happens if an applicant has exceptional test scores
and impressive work experience, yet scores low on
an EQ assessment?

Caruso doesn't recommend that schools use the assessment for
"high stakes admissions testing," but
rather, incorporate the measure within the education
the school offers.

"We strongly believe that business schools should teach
these skills, help students acquire emotion regulation strategies
and teach them how to better read people," the researcher tells
us. "These are becoming increasingly more important skills and
traditional curricula still ignores them."

Researchers say understanding your own emotional
intelligence skills can reveal new information about yourself, so
that you can effectively develop these much-needed skills before
entering the business and work world.